Oldak Quill wrote:
One issue is the project works in a different way, it is not possible to simply transfer Wiktionary contents into it. To embrace omegawiki, we'd have to phase out Wiktionary in its current state. I think omegawiki as Wiktionary 2.0 is a controversial idea among many Wiktionarians, though I can't give you any more details on that.
A unified multilingual project could make progress far more quickly. That omegawiki is based on WikiData also makes it more flexible and useful (as part of the semantic web, for researchers, for end-users, for contributors, &c.) Also, because users from different languages aggregate together, correctness of spelling and definition is more likely.
A lot of this depends on your philosophy of dictionaries. Are they descriptive or prescriptive? Translating dictionaries tend very heavily toward the prescriptive, directed toward efficiently solving the very real problem of rendering a text in one language into a readable text in another language. But translations taken from translating dictionaries will at best seem stillted, and often misleading unless you have fully explored the subtleties of both languages. That is not particularly efficient.
A top level single-language dictionary is built on descriptive historical principles in that it is evidence based. And, as much as in Wikipedia should be citing sources for usage. To the extent that a dictionary describes words in its own language it should always strive for a depth that is unachievable in a translation dictionary. A wise literary translator must be aware of the subtleties, preferably of both languages, but especially of the target language.
The problem for Wiktionary is how best to merge these conflicting tendencies.
Ec